THE NEW YORKER in international matters, he thought right up through July of 1914 that war between France and Germany was impossible; he and Lucie were on vacation in Upper Bavaria the day before Germany delivered its ultima- tum to France. They crossed the Swiss border in the middle of the night and, after four months of indecision in Italy, took refuge in Bern with his old friend Hermann Rupf. Kahnweiler spent five years in Switzerland, in a state of boredom and anxiety. Had he taken Picasso's earlier advice and become a French citizen, or had he taken the advice of his American partner Joseph Brenner and shipped his paintings to New York, much of his postwar mis- fortune might have been avoided. As it was, he managed to rebuild the gallery-renamed Galerie Simon, af- ter his silent partner André Simon, to avoid possible restrictions against own- ership by a German citizen-and steered it through the difficult Depression years, when even the rich \vere slow to pay their bills. He was no more prescient about the Second World War than about its prede- cessor; in 1933 he believed that "the Nazis would be quickly voted out of office," and in 1939, "when Germany Invaded Denmark and Norway, he still believed that Hitler would be de- feated." Fleeing Paris at the very last moment, the Kahnweilers made their way to the Limousin region, where one of his painters, Elie Lascaux, who had married Lucie's sister Berthe, had a home in a former abbey called Le Repaire, near the village of St. Leonard- de-Noblat. Here, in a community of Paris exiles that included Raymond Queneau, in a pleasant atmosphere of country walks ("They combed the village for vestiges of Ro- manesque art, and took long walks on trails and through chestnut groves, all the while keeping up an endless flow of conversation") and leisurely reading and writing, Kahnweiler whiled away the early forties; when, in August of 1943, the Gestapo appeared at the door and rifled through his store of Cubist canvases in a search for Resistance weapons, the Kahnweilers found refuge in Gascony, "and life in the countryside continued as before." For a Jewish dealer in "degenerate art," who, furthermore, had been a German draft dodger in the First World War, he was very fortu- nate; he even saved his gallery, through the device of selling it, when the call for the Aryanization of businesses went out from the German occupiers, to his unimpeachably French and Catholic sister-in-law and gallery associate, Louise Leiris. The Galerie Kahnweiler, which had become the Galerie Simon in 1920, now acquired its third and last name, Galerie Louise Leiris. In October of 1944, Kahnweiler returned to a freshly liberated Paris and assumed his postwar persona as a monstre sacré, the man who had mar- keted the Cubists two wars ago, in the laughing springtime of modernism. He shaved his head, and took on the gnomish look of a guru. He guarded the old flame fiercely: asked to help organize a Cubist retrospectIve for the Venice Biennale, "he featured the four great painters: Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger-but obstinately refused to include the works of 'Metzinger and his consorts,'" lesser Cubists he had always scorned. As he got older, the list of his pet peeves grew to include "crit- ics, abstract art, the government, New York as the art center, art for specu- lation, the politics of museum acquisi- tion." About most things he was prob- ably right, but it makes dull copy. Even the translator seems to be a bit ennuyé, laying down such absent-minded En- glish as "Seurat intrigued him in spite of the fact that his experimentation with pointillism was a promising un- dertaking only for the realistic subject of his paintings," "As the son of the mayor of Evrette, his parents' ambition was to have him become an ophthal- mologist," and "If he had not been Kahnweiler he could have been an anachronism, two generations later." A few piquant facts about modern art emerge from these many cir- cumspect, circumstantial pages: Klee wrote with his right hand but painted with his left; André Malraux, who wound up scrub- bing the façades of Paris for de Gaulle, was considered as a young man "slightly crazy, and definitely out of control"; Picasso thought that "col- lectors always prefer crusty paintings," by which he meant unfinished, con- firming Gris's lament "I would so much like my painting to have the ease and coquettish quality of unfinished work." A more inspired biographer might have done more with all this material, but it's as if Kahnweiler didn't wish to be inspiring. His austere and basically humble personality im- 87 DO YOU TEACH? I F SO, PLEASE R.EAD ON... "" \ ::J <: :I: Z 'Ii "I first saw The New Yorker when my htgh school English teacher gave me a copy. " -Garrison Keillor For information and materials to help you use The N ew Yorker in your high school or college classroom, please call Elaine Berman at (212) 536-5415 or write to her at the address below: THE NEW YORKER EDUCATION PROGRAM 20 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036-7440 . I KS N TAPE O co Lt';) to N Q') ë3 World's Largest Selection of Audio Books THE · Best Sellers I on Cassette ::D NOVEL CD cc è:: · Full-length !:n ""tI Readings James A. 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